Design & development of a message passing communication framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) represent a relatively new research domain aiming to unite the physical and the ICT worlds. Therefore, it is anticipated to have a huge impact in a wide range of real life application scenarios. Incorporating different engineering domains such as Wireless Sensor Networks and Embedded systems, CPSs are characterized from high degree of heterogeneity regarding various aspects, such as communication, hardware and software solutions. Additionally, in order to be well accepted from end users an end-to-end, it is of paramount importance to exhibit high degree of configurability and flexibility so as to applicable in a diverse application scenarios. Aiming to address such objectives this work proposes a holistic end-to-end CPS communication infrastructure based on message passing communication technologies. Presented scheme offers homogeneous support to a wide range of WSN communication technologies while the system wide architecture is able to adjust to any application or platform peculiarities. Additionally, the whole architecture is implemented based on commercial off-the-shelf equipment thus demonstrating the infrastructure's degree of feasibility. Finally, end to end performance evaluation is performed highlighting, on one hand, applicability of the system to a wide range of real applications and, on the other hand, resource conservative behavior advocating integration to nowadays embedded systems.